Salisbury International Arts Festival 2015 diary: Day 7

Matthew Stadlen reports from this year's Salisbury International Arts
Festival, after brushes with the LPO, Rory Bremner and a few camels

Crescendos with verve: The LPO play at Salisbury CathedralPhoto: Adrian Harris

By Matthew Stadlen

3:55PM BST 06 Jun 2015

On Thursday evening a Rolls Royce of an orchestra rolled into Salisbury, in the form of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. A first half of Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture, Romeo and Juliet and Dvorak’s Cello Concerto was followed by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade Op 35. I was maybe less familiar with the Tchaikovsky than with the Dvorak, and it was a terrific surprise.

You could imagine the Capulets and the Montagues in the music, which was was at times voluminous, at others laced with a hint of mischief and menace.

Conductor Jaime Martín, who encouraged crescendos with verve, had the brilliantly precise orchestra at the tips of his fingers during a rich tapestry of a piece. He and his players really did bring with them a classiness that didn’t disappoint beneath the Cathedral roof.

The Dvorak didn’t always captivate in the same way. I wasn’t completely convinced by the sound of the 26 year-old Armenian cellist, Narek Hakhnazaryan, despite his rave reviews and his victory at the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Maybe my ears were deceiving me, though, and he certainly played some of the passages with great sensitivity and musicality.

I learned from the programme notes that Dvorak had been helped in his composition of the concerto by his cellist friend Hanus Wihan. I also discovered that another friend of Dvorak, his benefactor Brahms, said of the work, “Why in the world didn’t I know one could write a cello concerto like this? If I’d only known, I’d have done it long ago!”

I was most engaged with the Rimsky-Korsakov during its fourth section. The first violinist was on top form and the orchestra magnificent. Martín is in perfect harmony with his players.

The night before I had the pleasure of welcoming Rory Bremner to the Playhouse stage in front of nearly 500 people. I’ve never before introduced so many personalities at the same time. There was David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Nigel Farage, David Frost, Jeremy Paxman, Huw Edwards, Bill Clinton, George Bush as well as Geoffrey Boycott and the late, great Richie Benaud.

There was even a Sepp Blatter joke. After 40 minutes of stand-up - Rory’s not mine - I returned to the stage to interview a man who is part satirist, part comedian, part impressionist and often all three at once.

Bremner isn’t just capable of being brilliantly funny, he’s also brilliantly incisive and has a razor sharp mind, backed up by research, that can cut through the spin of modern politics. His mind, and to some extent his body, seems ever on the move. When a relative was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, he recognised that he had many of the symptoms himself.

“You’ve probably seen today, when I was talking about going back to Juvenal, that wasn’t me just being a juvenile delinquent...” he said. “Well, that’s a classic example because I hear the word Juvenal and I can’t resist going for the pun. ADHT is called attention deficit, [but] it’s really attention surfeit because there’s too much going on in your brain - which is very useful if you’re a comedian, because you’re jumping and you’re making connections and you’re wired like that. So in a sense it’s my greatest friend and my worst enemy.

“It annoys me that I can’t concentrate and that I’m too easily distracted but... Brecht had this expression in Life of Galileo, the play, he talks about an oyster, and an oyster produces a pearl because it has an infection.

And so the thing is, would you rather have a healthy oyster or would you rather have a pearl? I’m not saying it’s always a pearl but it is an irritation, a disorder that yet has consequences which I enjoy.”

Bremner produced pearl after pearl during the evening. Towards the end he took us on a brief journey of Sir David Attenborough’s ageing voice before I asked him whom he has most enjoyed impersonating. “Bill Clinton,” he said, sounding exactly like the former President, “Because you could be naughty.”

Earlier in the week I chaired a discussion about ecology with the writers Ken Thompson and Henry Nicholls. In his book Where do Camels Belong?, Thompson questions the prejudices against so-called invasive species. It’s an important question for Nicholls too because he’s written A Natural History of The Galapagos.

“I started out like most ecologists,” said Thompson, “thinking that alien species were a major threat to biodiversity, and then I started reading the huge scientific literature on the subject rather more critically. The more I read the less I liked it and the more I realised that most of the bogey men that were out there were really figments of our imagination.”

As Ken Thompson revealed in his book, camels originally came from North America

Camels, it turns out, are from North America, where they evolved “at least 40 million” years ago. What belongs where is a complex question and anyway, perhaps a redundant one in many cases. Wolves, of course, once inhabited the British Isles.

“This is one of the most pernicious effects of a general fear and dislike of alien species,” said Thompson, “that even extinct natives in Britain are now seen as somehow honorary aliens. So that not only do people have reasonable fears about wolves - that we could allay - but they have this idea that they are somehow foreign animals.

“Whereas, in fact, they’re entirely entitled to be here – and if we hadn’t killed them all they would still be here. We have an ecosystem here in Britain, frankly, which is short of large predators. We have an ecosystem that’s very unbalanced. It’s very odd having no big predators. You know how many foxes you see every day - they look so smug, don’t they? And of course they can afford to look smug, because this is the one place on earth where they are the largest carnivore.” The foxes of Notting Hill look particularly smug, I pointed out.

It’s bad news, however, if you’re a goat in the Galapagos. Nicholls told us of an eradication programme on a tiny island where three of the animals are thought to have been introduced in 1957. They were eating the vegetation and altering the appearance of the island so 40,000 of them were shot during the 1970s alone.

Thompson’s position seemed to be that the large-scale killing of an invasive animal - say, to protect rare tortoises - can be acceptable, but whether such an act is acceptable or not should be divorced from the stigma attached to alien species.

Some conservationists, though, follow the cash, he explained. “One really easy way of getting money to work on an ecological project is to say that you want to work on something that everyone’s frightened of because hopefully you’ll find something that will help us kill it.”